Status-Q

Well, I’m in Boston and my long drive is almost at an end. I’ve clocked up about 1200 miles, listened to lots of Garrison Keillor, and seen some wonderful places. Tomorrow, work starts again, and then I have an overnight flight back to London which is only just over 6 hrs. Too short to get any meaningful sleep between the ‘welcome on board’ and the ‘we are now beginning our descent’.

Since I don’t keep any other diary, much of this blog is really for my own records. This post is an example. There follows a quick summary of my route over the last few days, which is probably of very little interest to anybody but me…!

Mon 11th. Tried to pick up the rental car from Dearborn in the evening. The Hertz website had failed to tell me that at the time I booked the car the office would actually be closed. Went back to the in-laws’ again.

Tues 12th. Picked up rental car. Across Ambassador bridge into Canada. Took a few deliberate wrong turns to see some nice Ontario countryside and a few accidental ones which took me to the outskirts of Cambridge, ON. Eventually reached Niagara-on-the-lake where a very pretty girl at the Chamber of Commerce found me a B&B and a ticket for the theatre. Natara’s House was run by a charming Scottish couple. The play was Berthold Brecht and Kurz Weill’s Happy End which is a sort of musical version of Major Barbara with a chunk of communist propoganda thrown in. Quite fun, but I prefer Shaw.

Wed 13th. Went to the Falls. More impressive than I remembered from last time, though high humidity meant the spray hung in the air and it was hard to see as much. Bought some maple choclolate fudge, which was consumed with enthusiasm over the next few days but suffered from the fact that it turned almost to liquid whenever I left the dark blue car in the sunshine and took many miles of air-conditioning to resolidify.
Over the Rainbow Bridge and I’m back in the USA, heading for the Finger Lakes. Drove to the north end of Senaca Lake and down to the south end, then across to Ithaca. Wonderful stay at the Inn on Columbia which is normally quite pricey but had good deals on any rooms still free after 4pm.

Thurs 14th. Taughannock Falls. Wonderful. Then an exploration of the Cornell campus – pleasant but very hot. Then I hit the highways and headed for the Adirondacks; Old Forge, NY to be precise, where I stayed at the 19th Green Motel which was very friendly and reasonably priced.

Fri 15th. Lots of driving through little towns past beautiful lakes. Wanted to jump in. Lunch at the Swiss Kitchen in Tupper Lake, visited Olympic ski-jump at Lake Placid. Quite interesting, rather pricey. Not a great deal to see. Water sparkling on Lake Champlain as I took the ferry across to Burlington, VT. Acommodation starts to get harder to find on Friday nights, and I ended up at the GGT Tibet Inn. Plain, but clean and very well priced. Downtown Burlington is small and busy. People sitting at outside tables in the pedestrianised town centre. A good buzz. Including from the mosquitoes, which bit me inside the restaurant as well as out.

Sat 16th Vermont is lovely. All of it, as far as I can see. Pretty & well-looked after. Shelburne Farms in the morning, then down south and through the Green Mountain region, resisting the lure of the Ben & Jerry Factory Tour. Had planned to stay in central New Hampshire, but everything very booked up as a result of the NASCAR at Louden. A tourist information guy told me that Concord, NH has a population of around 38,000, but gets an extra 90,000 during the NASCAR. In the end I carried on over into Massachusetts and stayed at the completely unmemorable Wyndham hotel at Andover.

Sun 17th Concord & Lexington and the Minute Man National Park. Splendid, despite what happened there!
Into Boston, and managed to get a good rate on a very good room at the Omni Parker House Hotel, which claims, amongst other things, to be the longest continually-operating hotel in the US, celebrating 150 yrs this year. Recommended if you can get a good rate. (You won’t get one for your car parking. $36/night. But, from memory, Boston and Cambridge are some of the most expensive places to park that I’ve ever been, and this is pretty much par for the course.) Watched the new Batman movie (very good) and listened to a bit of an open-air concert on the Common.

And that is where I write this, and now it’s time for bed… More details of much of the above can be found on the postings of the relevant days. And I have lots and lots of photos…

…three if by rental car.

The British rode from Lexington to Concord again today, but this time the locals must have been more enthusiastic about their arrival. They welcomed them with open… wifi networks.

The Minute Man Visitor Center on Battle Road has an excellent half-hour multimedia presentation. Recommended for anyone visiting the area who’s a little rusty on what happened there. The road between these two beautiful towns is also very pretty and it’s worth spending some time there.

I also went to the North Bridge in Concord, which is being rebuilt and so had a big bulldozer in front of it. I heard another Brit near me saying to his kids, “Come on, let’s go to Lexington. We won that one!”.

I’ve just had one of the best steaks of my life, for a very reasonable price, at Mancy’s in Toledo, Ohio. There aren’t very many other reasons for visiting Toledo, but if you should find yourself in the area, the ribeye comes highly recommended.

Oh, and the art museum is pretty good too.

Well, the story continues…

My 4th July was spent installing a cable modem at my parents-in-law’s house in Melvindale, MI. That in itself was quite a different experience from the UK, where cable TV is not widely distributed and adjustments to your installation need a little man to come and do his black magic. Here, I walk into Best Buy, pick up a self-install kit, take it home and plug it in and then just call the cable company to enable it. More about that in a mo.

I also picked up a couple of WiFi PCi cards for the PCs and a wireless router – the trusty old Linksys WRT54G, which seems to have captured a lot of the market. This thing actually runs a basic Linux and can be modified if you’re that way inclined (I’m not, at present). But it would be fascinating to know, between this box and the TiVo, just how many homes and offices now have Linux in them without realising it…

Anyway, all of this hardware turned out to be remarkably cheap because Comcast were doing a promotion, but it will require me to spend most of tomorrow filling out and posting the ‘mail-in rebate’ forms that accompany every electronic purchase here now. For non-US readers not familiar with this, when you go into a retail store, the price on a device might be $79.99. But in small print on the label, you find out that it’s $129.99 and you can get the difference back by sending in a little form and a photocopy of the receipt and your birth certificate and a pint of your own blood and… well, you get the idea. Sometimes you have to send off two forms, one to the retailer and one to the manufacturer. I have a total of ten of these things to fill in after yesterday’s little spree. Of course, they’re banking on the fact that most people are too lazy or forgetful (or not as cheap as we are) and so just pay the full price while the store advertises a lower one. God save us from this model in the UK!…

Meanwhile, back at home, everything is quickly set up and works out of the box and I just have to call Comcast to enable it. I get through to a very nice guy called Jake who goes through the procedure and sets it up, but he, or somebody else involved, makes a mistake in the database entry which he does not have the authority to fix. Nearly as frustrating for him as it was for me, but he has to refer it to somebody higher up. However, here I have to put in a good word for Comcast. Apart from this little blunder, I have never had such good telephone support from any company anywhere. This will come as a surprise to some, I know, because there are enough horror stories floating around about all cable providers, but I came away with nothing but admiration. Jake was intelligent, apologetic and helpful. He kept calling me back to tell me how things were progressing. He gave me his extension number in case I had any problems. And when we were finally connected he volunteered to spend more time on the phone with me to walk me through the various facilities on offer from the new service etc. I couldn’t believe it. I guess they must have recognised that their future lies in broadband and that they can’t have rumours going around that it’s difficult to set up, and have funded the support department appropriately. Or maybe I just struck lucky. But I wish other companies would learn from their example.

So we now have a 4Mbit connection and it all works nicely. We even worked out that we could cancel the old ISP subscription and one phone line and actually save money. This is a Good Thing.

The next challenge is dealing with my brother-in-law’s Windows machine which has been completely trashed by a virus, and for which we appear to have no original install CDs… No, this isn’t the machine I mentioned a couple of days ago. It’s the other Windows machine that has been trashed by a virus here… Tune in for the next exciting episode of “Melvindale in the new millennium”…

I’m in Michigan at present with the in-laws, and one of my jobs each time I visit is to try and get their computer back in order. This is a reasonably recent machine, running Windows XP, and on a dialup line. You’d be amazed at just how much spyware and how many viruses manage to accumulate on this machine between my visits.

Yes, they have Norton Antivirus, but the process of getting updates is a bit complex for them to deal with and renewing subscriptions would be pretty much impossible. Windows Updates would take an age to download on their 26k modem link. But the worrying thing for me is that the account they use to log in does not have Administrator privileges. Just imagine what might happen if it did…

O, for a Mac and for broadband…